Mea Culpa – Dark Hours
blog.terrygodier.com
Initial thread about original Gruber post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49214863
Gruber's retraction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166
blog.terrygodier.com
Gruber's retraction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166
The developer's astrology app containing tarot reading features was rejected from Apple's App Store that prohibits astrology apps.
He then replaced the app's content with a clone of, if not the identical open source astronomy app "Dark Hours", copying even the name. The original is here: https://darkhours.app
The developer was then in contact with John Gruber, who wrote an article claiming Apple's reviewers confuse a nice, scientific astronomy app with astrology. The developer reviewed the article before publication.
It then turned out that the developer forgot to mention that originally he did upload an astrology app for review. Gruber felt duped, and noted that it's unclear whether an updated build containing the new astronomy app was ever submitted to Apple for review: https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
Now the developer seems to claim that he merely accidentally cloned that open source app when working with Claude.
I am not buying it.
Are there any links to this stuff that you can share?
[UPDATED] Ah. I see this post has it[0].
> To the best of my recollection, this is the first post I’ve retracted in the 24 years I’ve been writing Daring Fireball. I hope it’s the last. I was misled, both overtly and through omissions, in several ways, but what I publish is my responsibility, and I apologize for the error.
They are a pretty arrogant megacorp, and tend to make decisions that primarily benefit themselves.
But I generally have a positive relationship with them.
Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino: https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...
Apple subsequently stopped providing Apple execs for his annual live podcast recording at WWDC. They don't confirm it was because of that piece (unsurprisingly) but it seems very likely it was.
“I wonder how much Cook dithered over that cheerful-looking exclamation mark. I hope he regrets it. … I wonder how much it stings to be reminded that all the money in the world cannot buy dignity. I wonder too, what taste Cheetos-dusted 78-year-old testicles leave in one’s mouth. Whatever the flavor, I hope it lingers.”
From the very end of this: https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/i_wonder
I, too, feel entirely duped. What the heck dude. Uploading an astrology app that later pivoted to astronomy and having that be rejected for astrology is a way different problem from just having the latter rejected for astrology.
Thanks for drawing the chain. Infuriating.
Coincidentally:
Just in the last few weeks, D'addario, one of largest guitar string manufacturers, posted on Instagram what is clearly an AI-song to advertise its new line of guitar strings.
After being called out on it being AI, they posted a mobile-recording of the song recreated in a DAW, but it didn't even match the timing or the notes played.
After being called on it AGAIN, they blamed it on LANDR and Apple Mastering "changing the notes", but those only do "AI knob tweaking", they're not generative-ai audio synthesis. LANDR itself replied.
After being called on it AGAIN, they finally caved and said one of their workers used Suno without their knowledge.
After someone contacted the worker, he said he was pretty clear in his communication with D'addario that he had used Suno.
EDIT: The worker claimed it was "his first time using AI" and "he didn't know", but after someone did some digging in his Instagram profile, there's a few Suno songs and a lot of AI posters and avatars.
This sort of ass-covering is getting crazy with AI...
It's disheartening for those of us who intrinsically value human authorship.
(Good luck getting close enough to actually tell if the live performance is real or faked, though, for anything other than small, local or super niche bands...)
Just blame the next thing down the chain that can't defend itself, so you don't have to take responsibility.
Huh I guess it is comparable to “it was AI” lol
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/my-brain-made-me-...
He didn't understand that Google was remembering his own past searches, and self-owned on camera. Turns out his wife and kids were more performative than interest-based.
This is not the defense they think it is.. If your mechanic rotates your tires and improperly torques the lug bolts "it was my first time using a torque wrench" isn't excusable. It's good to experiment and learn new things. It's not good to throw your little self-study project out into the world with your employer's name behind it and present it as production worthy material.
There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly, with the same name and branding, without being told to do so in some way. I just don't believe it.
And him not using it and calling out AI is just him covering his ass
Except that some portion of D'addario's customers--presumably those that actually buy their guitar strings to create music via real guitars--aren't okay with it.
Now, unless the company in question got their new strings into Sona training data, I wager that the generated output has little casual connection with the product being advertised. If I found out IKEA's newest product looks nothing like on the commercial, because the ad was using generative AI and hallucinated something approximating the product, I'd be looking at it as fraudulent too.
Also, I think when judged by the court of public opinion, the overwhelming answer was "yes, it's fraudulent", or at least "misleading and useless" as most people even complained that the song sounds like an overproduced mess where any string would sound the same.
Shows how much trust they have in their own product.
Entropy doesn't need to be set to zero for legally significant duplication
If you give a description of the app you want, and it matches another persons Open Source app. Then why wouldn't Claude do what it does every other time and pull from it's corpus of knowledge?
Now I would expect the human-in-the-chain to verify what is going on and ultimately they are responsible for any output they lay claim to.
In this case, AI assisted or not, it is a dick move. TFA claims they are backing out of this space completely - which is the correct thing to do.
But as with all "my punch simply slipped!" apologies their reputation is tarnished and they will need to demonstrate they are better in future - not simply say so.
I dont know why, but I do know know that it doesn't. I know because I've tried similar things when playing around with AI to see what it could do. "Make an app similar to X app [link to repo]"
Depending on how its feeling, it may just read the readme or it may go through the codebase. But I've never gotten line by line code copying.
> I would expect the human-in-the-chain to verify what is going on
I agree with this, to the extent of your second point
> they are responsible for any output they lay claim to.
How far does the rabbit hole go for verifying what is going on? If the LLM did indeed copy an entire codebase at its own behest, what reason would the author have to verify that it wasn't copied, given that every other time they've used an LLM to code it never copied an entire codebase?
Might be better in newer models though.
But for a real "copy" it would default to calling `cp` in bash.
That is up to the person claiming the output. The point is not what the person knows about the output. It is the fact that laying claim to that output, means they are responsible.
To dramatise the point, they don't get to put computer viruses out on the internet and then later say "Oh, the LLM must've done it..." and walk away.
Use the tools you use. But the code is yours.
The simple truth of the matter is that contempt for your customers is now normal. I expect this from Fender, now; they are utterly without soul.
But D'Addario are really one of the most analogue companies ever and they are still family-owned; they should have understood the magnitude of this problem right at the beginning and just apologised.
At least one of my three guitars will likely continue to have their PB strings, probably, because they still sound the best on my cheap Weissenborn clone.
But it is very disappointing and it leaves a bad taste. Perhaps I will revisit Rotosounds (wound in a factory very near where I grew up) for my PBs. The UK also has Newtone strings so I really have no reason to continue to support D'Addario (though the low-tension Aloha set I really like for the Weissenborn copy that lets me have a 15 on the high D is always backordered).
I think to some degree this is going to be inevitable for a while. No matter what people think about the ethics of AI or AI use, the fact of the matter is it exists, and it is shaking up and going to shake up a lot of the world. I personally think "AI" isn't really a product anymore than "The Internet" is a product. It's infrastructure in the same way the internet is, or to quote "Halt and Catch Fire", it's "the thing that gets us to The Thing".
The problem is no one really knows what The Thing looks like, so everyone is throwing anything they can think of at the wall and hoping to see what sticks. And they're dong this because they remember Sears and they remember Blockbuster. No one wants to be the next company that was positioned perfectly to integrate the new technology into their business model and missed the boat completely for short sightedness or lack of speed. "$foo but with AI" is the current generation's "$foo but on the internet", and everyone is scrambling hard to not be the next company that someone writes a "whatever happened to them" youtube video about.
Incidentally, this "AI as infrastructure" view I have is also why I really think governments should be getting into the space of building and distributing training data sets and models. Not only because it could reduce the overall amount of bot scraping and traffic if everyone who wants to build could go to a known good and clean source of training data, but also because nominal usage fees could help manage the copyright concerns. I've pitched it before in more detail, but I imagine something akin to radio broadcast royalty licenses, where people whose copyrighted works are part of the government training sets are paid out "royalties" from the pool of money brought in from licensing the training sets.
True. But the way it is approached is an exceptionally valuable yardstick for judging people's intent.
There is no way that "being at the forefront of AI" is a strategy that gets Fender anywhere except towards unthinking inward investment. Even in the narrow context of NAM captures and the like, it is clumsily antithetical to their audience to say this.
But writing off the one thing that actually sells guitars in the 21st century (covers bands!) as "analogue AI" is the most extraordinarily tone-deaf, rude, dismissive thing that someone who runs a musical instrument company could ever say.
I'm not so sure about that. Guitar bands playing original music is huge where I am right now, shoegaze / nugaze / grunge / dreampop is where the zeitgeist is here. As a middle-aged guy who was a teen during grunge, it's heartening to see the 20 year olds now buying Jaguar guitars (and a bunch of pedals) and new bands emerging each week. Everyone is nerding out over their obscure Bandcamp purchases, and it's definitely a thing that you need to write your own original material. The occasional cover is okay, but there's a definite "ick" to being a cover band.
"Analogue AI" as a description of playing a cover is harsh, but I can also see some of that label sticking. You didn't write the music or the lyrics, you're taking the credit and money for someone else's work. That seems to be some of the anti-AI attitude around here.
But you're right that "the forefront of AI" is not going to appeal to that audience, at all.
(Personally I'm pro-AI - not Suno stuff, but I think it will eventually find a place in the same way that synthesizers & sampling & DAWs did, all of which were regarded as cheating at the time they came out. I remember the grunge albums with "AAD" Analog / Analog / Digital printed on the CD sleeve just as Pro Tools was emerging.)
Fender USA and Squier Jaguars and lots of pedals are for ppl in original bands.
But the money is in Custom Shop Gibson, Fender and PRS, which are for ppl in the older generations playing mostly in 70s cover bands, or just hanging it in the wall to occasionally play Smoke on the Water. TheGearPage has become a very influential force in the industry almost like HN has.
That said - the few people I know in the "rich kid buying gear" segment are deep into AI, and wouldn't blink twice at using it to generate music for their events. Much of their audience wouldn't necessarily care. The equipment they have is more to show off "here is this expensive thing you can't afford, I have it, I don't even use it".
So maybe there's lots of diverse markets and I really don't know how it will play out :)
But then I'm a weirdo; the only guitars that really float my boat the moment are the Duesenberg lap steels and that Eastwood fretless cello guitar...
The original Harley Benton/ABM Slider lap steel was outstanding and I was stupid not to get one.
Dunno how the lawyers and doctors think about AI music, though.
Pretty sure that, as a first approximation, essentially all bands are covers bands. At a first approximation, all electric guitarists only play along to other people's songs in their bedrooms! The proportion who ever play for anyone else is tiny.
It's just mindblowing to be that rude about the core market, especially for the luxury guitars they want to be known for.
> I remember the grunge albums with "AAD" Analog / Analog / Digital printed on the CD sleeve just as Pro Tools was emerging.)
I'm not sure digital recording is a fair comparison. Though at any rate, the first digitally recorded album (Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop from 1979) sounds so sonically dead that its artist has essentially disowned it.
It is, coincidentally, essentially a covers album. Ruined by its production; The Very Thing That Makes You Rich (Makes Me Poor) could have sounded immense and it does not.
The problem is that this is only happening because the powerful are forcing it on us. This is exactly why the backlash against it has gotten so big. Had companies not jumped on the AI bandwagon and forced it down veryone's throats (sometimes putting your job on the line if you refused) the backlash probably would be non-existent. The AI boosters/pro-AI people will of course continue to claim that nobody is forcing you to use AI (I literally had this told to me on a different forum like 4 days ago, it was honestly ridiculous how delusional this particular booster was...)
That's probably a function of the people I'm around more than anything else. It is also the case that AI is being pushed on people, sometimes forcefully. But the category of people who use it because they want to is very large.
Look, I won't deny that like the dot-com bubble and the "cloud" hype of years before that there isn't overhyping and forcing going on. But this feels to me a lot like someone in the mid 90's looking at this "internet" thing and thinking it's all a fad being pushed on us by computer nerds. I'm not saying every company and every attempt to stuff "AI" into everything is going to be some revolution that will stick with us forever, but neither were a lot of early online providers. But like I said, AI is infrastructure, and people are going to figure out how to build things on top of it that will become integrated and standard parts of our lives, just like computers, the internet and the cloud are all today.
Companies are losing investment because they're not positioning themselves as AI-centric or having AI features.
This is happening across every sector I'm familiar with: productivity software, music software, HR software, enterprise documentation, learning software, developer tools.
This is not someone getting enthusiastic about the OpenAI API back in the day, this is literally companies fighting for investment money by tackling AI into their product.
The irony is how unnecessary it was. They could've just said, yeah you're right, we used AI. This is a level of lying you reserve for covering up a murder or something. Maybe they're just worried (and they're right to be worried) that it's easier to make music with AI than with their strings.
I refuse to believe nearly 100% of game developers aren't using AI, but how many put the tag of shame on the Steam store page?
It's a very strange situation.
Do you refuse to believe nearly 100% of written content isn't made by AI? Was your comment?
I struggle to imagine thinking that no one does things themselves, for fun. What a nihilistic view.
I can absolutely believe it, and I think it’s fine. If you have AI code up the logic for something boring but necessary (the setting screen ui, for one example. Don’t argue against this one example, that isn’t the point) it will leave a developer to work on the parts of games that actually make a difference to the experience.
Frankly, it would be silly not to use ai for some things. The trouble is that if it’s a binary “used ai” flag, there is no way to distinguish a one shot Claude slop game from someone who uses AI for internationalization
What is the point then? The best games have all of their elements working together in service of their intended experience.
> someone who uses AI for internationalization
Do you think this would be an ok use of AI for a game? Did you not see the outrage over Hollow Knight: Silksong's translation last year? How every time a game is discovered to have used AI for translation there is an immediate backlash?
Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful way. Hell, name a game from memory that didn't have the same settings screen with minor styling variations as every other game you played. What exactly am I missing out on by having a resolution dropdown that was hand coded? Does a bespoke "ultra" graphics slider bring the characters to life in a way that AI just can't? Besides, using AI isn't mutually exclusive with all of the elements working together. My point is that AI, wielded properly, makes that easier to achieve. If you don't have to spend a month hand coding sliders for a settings screen, you can get on with making the actual game. Do you also rail against game engines which provide all of this stuff in a generic way?
I do think that using AI to help with internationalization is fine, as long as you QA it just like any code or content that is created by man or machine. It's a tool, and you have to know how and when to use any tool. You can get plenty of good translation out of an AI if you are using it properly.
Also worth noting that Silksong was verified to have a human translation team, and they never clarified if AI was used. It's entirely possible that today's SOTA AI would have done a much better job. The problem with your argument about translation is you and I have no idea how many games have been machine translated well, and never saw an issue. Because of the way gamers are (frequently unhinged about minor things. Prone to groupthink. Extremely vocal. Absolute in opinions like "There is no acceptable use for AI in gaming"), you just can't stick your neck out and say, "We used AI for our localizations, then had native speakers QA it, and not one had issues." You risk becoming a lightning rod for puritans because you wanted to give Romanians a chance to play a game in their own language.
Even if you disagree on using AI for these things, I can keep coming up with ways that AI can make a game better. That's why I told you not to argue against specific examples. Maybe a game designer told an AI to review the code and find performance improvement opportunities. Would you be upset if the game was half the size, and could run higher frame-rates with the exact same content? Is that still an unacceptable us of AI, or would you rather that the man hours that could otherwise go to things that humans are better at get spent on optimizations. I personally would rather have a game with better performance from an AI and more human created side quests, than a game with better performance and fewer side quests because they ran out of budget hiring people to dig into compiler settings.
So yeah, I think it is completely reasonable to use AI in gaming or any domain of programming. I've been around long enough to remember human teams turning out absolute steaming piles of garbage. The issue isn't AI, the issue is people turning out steaming piles of garbage. AI just makes that easier, but by no means does it make it inherent to use.
Most of these are going to be smaller indie games that already don't have many settings to set. Off the top of my head, I'd probably say Ultrakill takes the cake with its opening screen. Based on the description of the expectations, my guess is you're mostly basing your expectations off of large AAA games with multiple pages of settings? Fair enough that they should mostly be implementing "standards" correctly, and theming and character take a back seat.
It sounds like your overall point mostly relates not to settings screens, but things that "don't meaningfully affect gameplay". I think that's a much better argument than the one your example point led me to understand.
As a final note, it's worth reiterating that Steam does not require disclosure for AI-gen code. That settings menu example you were mentioning would be fine, as long as it used art assets generated by a human.
This mentality is exactly why most modern AAA games are so generic and uninteresting. Great games are more than just their gameplay; they're complete, coherent experiences assembled by people who care about every part of them, not just the parts they deem to be "the important ones". Someone who doesn't care at all what their game's settings menu looks like probably doesn't truly care about any other part of the game, either - it suggests their primary concern is not the quality of the game, but how quickly and cheaply it can be made.
Games having menus and HUD interfaces that fit the rest of their aesthetic was once the standard, before the current trend of minimalism took over. Why do you think that is? Was it just because the developers of yesteryear were all idiots wasting time and budget on things that didn't matter instead of maximizing shareholder value? Or was it because they were focused on making a high quality, coherent game first, and making it "efficiently" second?
> Do you also rail against game engines which provide all of this stuff in a generic way?
Yes, every other game being made in Unreal Engine nowadays is one of the biggest contributing factors to them all feeling so samey (and running badly). Developers who don't care about the quality of the game and just want to get it out the door with the minimum effort possible gravitate towards Unreal Engine, because it's made for them, and this is reflected in the end product.
> I can keep coming up with ways that AI can make a game better.
No, you can come up with ways that AI can make the game easier and cheaper to make at the cost of craftsmanship. It's not the same thing. Adding more side quests won't make the game better if they're not made by people who care about the game as a whole and all its little details. Whatever improvements or optimizations your AI can come up with, a skilled human developer could come up with, too, the difference being that the human demands a living wage in exchange for his work, and that's just awful, isn't it? It's simply not possible for the entirety of the game to be crafted with care without going over budget (let's ignore all the past examples of games that did exactly this, with much smaller budgets, before unappealing ultra realistic graphics became the standard).
Come on. There are shades here.
I guarantee that even your best programmers are using AI to run down certain classes of bugs--especially in corporate environments. Asking the AI to help you unwind some screwy source control merge or to remember some obscure set of flags is a damn good usage of AI, for example. Nobody thinks twice of using a search engine for this so AI is a no-brainer.
The issue is when people use the AI for all the code. I have to tell AI all the time "That code is there because X and you mangling it is a problem." or "You violated Y. Explain to me why you did that anyway and don't do it again."
The problem is that to do that you have to know the code and you don't know the code if you didn't write it.
It's like "The computer did it" from the 80's and 90's. Blame the tool for the operator usage.
It's pathetic.
Their customers are musicians. They want to hear what the strings sound like in a demo. What they did was not just dishonest, it's contrary to literally everything their customers do.
Whoever did it has no sense and shouldn't be working in that business. Full stop.
I say this as a D'Addario customer of 20+ years that will never buy their strings again.
For example: since a few years now, it became extremely common for apps and games to be advertised with fake screenshots, fake gameplay, and fake interactions.
AI just put all that on turbo mode.
A marketing manager coming from apps/games (or other industry where this is common) joining D'addario will just push for AI music to be used because "that's how things are done".
Seems to me like that worker's ass wasn't covered at all and now everyone's all up in his shit on his socials, and the layers of management get to wash their hands, even though it's the management and executive that are pushing AI at all costs.
What a sad dystopia we are creating.
Until people started getting technical, they weren’t really passing the bucket to anyone. It was only partially with the LANDR lie, and then with the final accusation that they really “passed the bucket”.
Blocking commenters, having employees and endorsers mock customers, all that was 100% Daddario.
In fact a lot of people commended them for not throwing employees under the bus before it happened.
I think it’s shaping up like he didn’t “forget” to mention it. This looks like an intentional play for attention. It worked very well. Too well, in fact, which drew enough eyes on to the situation to start noticing the cracks in his story.
A key part of the Gruber retraction article is that Apple rejected a different app named Asterly. He then copied the Dark Hours app, including the name, from someone else and tried to imply that was the app at the center of the controversy.
If he had actually written his own astronomy app and swapped it into the story he may have gotten away with it. Doing the wholesale copying of someone else’s work, including the name of the project and stripping the license in the process, is what got him caught.
App Store rejection stories are always popular. I see at least one post a month on Hacker News from an app developer trying to get attention because their app was rejected and it usually receives moderate social media attention. I think this person saw an opportunity to ride that anger for some personal publicity and went for it. He flew too close to the sun and got too much attention, though, so his mistruths were revealed. Now he’s trying some CYA techniques because the original ruse backfired.
Does this seems like rational behavior, guys?
Surely if I'm doing something wrong you can explain it to me with words, right?
EDIT: WOW - the whole thread has been removed. Yikes guys - erasing the record is the opposite of transparency. You understand the value of transparency, right?
Wait - does this mean that HN censors people based on the hunches of its popular readers?
Do you guys just make shit up as you go along? And then delete people for it?
Really?
"I am not racist, but..."
You are misattributing a quote.
That's curious. What legitimate-sounding reason could Apple have to reject astrology on their platform? Isn't this exactly the kind of discrimination against fields of endeavour that would make a slam-dunk case for any antitrust enforcement?
> Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience. We may remove these apps from the App Store going forward if they are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers. Other kinds of apps, such as drinking games, Kama Sutra, fart, and burp apps, are mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort and do not add value to the App Store.
Also I'm not sure if I should be insulted when they insist that The Kama Sutra is "low effort".
There are categories of app that already have 100 trillion low effort copy-paste slop apps.
In those categories, Apple applies a more stringent “must demonstrate some real differentiation” criteria. They also prune those categories of existing apps more aggressively.
It’s fair to wonder what counts, and how uniformly they apply it, but the motivation is not, “no astrology apps.”
This guy pumped out slop for a high-slop category. It got rejected. That’s where it started.
All the bullshit and lies from everyone snowballed from that.
No.
Some of them even made it into the top 20 grossing apps on the store.
All the reviews with text would complain about accidentally subscribing.
Apple was earning a 30% commission on those subscriptions.
Telling people you can tell them their future based on the stars is demonstrably misleading lol.
Ooof that is a terrible dark mode theme.
Before these requirements the app store was filling up with thousands of flashlight apps, todo lists, and other simple apps that people would build (or clone) to get something into the app store.
1. https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/07/browsers-have-standa...
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20260807141155/https://blog.terr...
But I also think this is an extreme example of a much more general problem of provenance.
There are a lot of people vibe-coding apps who lack the “basic” skills needed to do this due diligence at even the coarsest level that we arguably see here (not making any comment either way on this specific author).
Does that get them off the hook? I don’t think so. They’ve created a thing and they are naturally responsible for whether or not that thing involves theft or appropriation of IP from other sources.
It’s an “ignorance is not an excuse” kind of thing.
This scales all the way up to agentic development in large organisations, but it also becomes much more granular and subtle, which is perhaps where it becomes more interesting - and certainly a lot more challenging. Where has that chunk of code come from? How do you know where it’s come from? Is there even a feasible way of finding out?
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
And an identical bug, per the Bluesky convo Gruber linked.
https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2...
Getting Claude to make the same exact mistake twice in non-deterministic manner takes real effort!
That seems to be the thing everyone is into, these days.
There have been quite a few copyright cases alleging this behavior that LLMs are not substantially transformative[1]. Note that cases have largely been ruled in the favor of the AI companies, with courts ruling that model output is “substantially transformative” of training material (although what is currently legally permissible may not be what we feel is socially permissible or ethical). The the fact that these allegations continue to be made, and the fact that AI companies seem to be trying to cover their asses by disallowing prompts which would be likely to create content highly similar to that of copyrighted training material [2] might be enough to at least warrant some consideration that Godier is being honest here.
Not that this would absolve Godier (quite the opposite in my mind- low effort ai workflows produce slop, and he chose this intentionally), but perhaps some of the onerousness here also falls on the AI companies pillaging of work.
[1] https://copyrightalliance.org/ai-copyright-lawsuit-developme... E.g. https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/chatgpt-stops-cloning-fam...
I find this plausible. I'd like to see the prompt and chat transcript.
(a damage-control strategy where an organization or individual admits to a portion of a secret or scandal after a cover story fails, while still hiding the most damaging key facts.)
An LLM/agent harness generally doesn’t just claim another project wholesale, including specific bugs, as the base of your idea, unless you ask it to.
Now that you've introduced the phrase I can see it in a lot of recent scandals.
Peter Attia, a popular health and longevity podcaster who was revealed to have substantial ties to Jeffrey Epstein used this exact trick recently. When the Epstein e-mails were released it was discovered that he continued to consort with Epstein after all of the revelations. Even worse, he talked to Epstein about the fallout from the accusations and continued to cozy up to him. He was trying to run a very expensive concierge medical clinic and relied on Epstein's connections to get more clients, so he wanted to continue keeping that relationship warm.
When the e-mails came out he issued a public non-apology that implied he had no idea about any of Epstein's activities. It was plausible enough if you never saw the actual e-mails and thought Epstein was just another contact in his network, but the actual e-mails revealed that he was continuing to converse with Epstein after the revelations, including about the revelations!
So "limited hangout" is precisely what he and his PR team tried to execute. It seems to have worked on a limited set of his fan base who still try to downplay his Epstein connections to this day. The e-mails are easy to find, though.
>> The words are non-intuitive
Yeah.
"Incomplete mea culpa", "Incomplete admission", "Incomplete penance", "Incomplete contrition", "Incomplete remorse", actually say "the thing" instead of using a new random phrase.
I like "incomplete contrition" or "gas light remorse".
Apparently the phrase is very old, pre-dating the internet. It came out of the CIA.
In this context hangout is a clipped form of "letting it all hang out"
So it's saying you're putting on the appearance of letting it all hang out, but the information revealed is limited.
"Gaslight confession" or "gaslight apology" are much clearer. By directly addressing the intent to deceive, they are both accurate, and can help discourage the practice.
("Gaslight" is also unintuitive upon first encounter, but has a widely established meaning at this point.)
Did Godier copy the other guy’s repo, name and all, and try to pass it off as his own work? That seems like the obvious conclusion, albeit brazen to the point of insanity.
Did Claude copy the repo, in response to a prompt? If Claude copies a Claude vibe-coded project, can any plagiarism really be said to have taken place?
Or is this just what Claude is statistically likely to spit out if you prompt it to build an astronomy app and leave it to it?
You can trace back to the original repo from that thread. The key points are that the copy had
1. The same name. One was "Dark Hours" and the other was "DarkHours".
2. The same highly specific bug. I didn't investigate closely but from the description the bug sounds too unique to have been identically created in a fresh Claude-style duplication.
The duplicated name is the most damning part to me. I've never tried to copy a project with Claude, but I can't imagine the sequence of events that would lead to Claude copying the name of a repo but going to lengths to disguise other things like stripping the license. This all seems highly intentional, like someone thought it would never be noticed.
A name clash is the least damning evidence in my opinion. Last year my previous employer asked us for suggestions for naming an AI agent. Everyone produced pretty much the same list, because everyone just asked ChatGPT.
Except me. I had also asked ChatGPT, but I bothered to google the suggestions and found there were already like half a dozen AI agents for every suggestion.
(they ultimately launched what was by then the 7th or 8th AI-related product with essentially the same name)
Creativity in naming doesn’t seem to be their strongest suit.
let me guess, they called it "Copliot"
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/current-rss-feed-reader/id6758...
I have all but given up using the multiple trillion weight models in favor of smaller open weight models that have hopefully abstracted away copyrightable details. Right now deepseek-v4-flash-0731 seems usually perfect for my needs.
I saw Cees de Groot post about LLM vibe coded projects containing all sorts of licensed material, and I think he is correct.
Perhaps another good reason to just use the AGPL for new projects? I decided to use the AGPL for may latest fun project https://github.com/mark-watson/racket-coding-agent (personal AI coding harness written for my own use in Racket Scheme). Everything I do is open source or open content books, so I am happy to have everything I do to be used by humans and also for AI training, however: it is scary to by mistake be in the position of not acknowledging other work when appropriate.
This was a beautiful ending
Maybe it’s not career-ending, but it’s definitely career-hurting. Being welcomed and mentioned by popular indie devs, bloggers, and power users is a way of breaking onto the scene. If those people now actively distrust you, maybe your current app(s) can continue to thrive for a while, but whatever you release next won’t get much traction from those same circles. Ben Surtees is another dev who scorched their name, by sneakily selling their app which required a bunch of permissions (and thus trust).
https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/05/24/ive-been-a-little-di...
And how much of that is original with the blog author? Previously, one might have just given them the benefit of the doubt, as it should be. But now it swings the other way, and I'll assume that the author not only doesn't have an original thought in their head, they'll lie to cover their ass, too.
That's a terrible lesson.
It's an open source app. Tell you agent to fork it an contribute to it if you have any ideas that might improve it.
You don't want to build castles anymore if you don't own the whole sandbox?
It's as if real people are not all good or all bad, but can do good things, and bad things too.
Published a rip-off? "Sorry, Claude must have done this".
Published a shitty/wrong/insensitive/<insert other adjectives here> post somewhere? "Sorry, the AI wrote it"
Regardless of how we view LLMs as a whole, if you produce content with AI and publish it, you personally own every line of what you published. "Claude did it" cannot ever be a valid excuse.
I think this an incredibly important point. As soon as we devolve reposnsiblity to computer progams, society cedes control to the algorithm vendors.
Jeff Geerling was called out today for his clickbaity video entitled "Intel just matched Apple Silicon. Seriously.". Jeff's personal response was "I had three YouTube titles, this one got about 2x the watch time as the other two, so I let YT pick it."
Another commenter replied: "You are trying to launder responsibility for a clickbait title to a computer program." I think this exactly nailed the problem.
"I was genuinely only using Claude to make my writing clearer/redraft/to organize my thoughts because I can't write as well as you can"
The new one for me this week was someone claiming they write exactly like Claude does.
> A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
When companies like Amazon accept, warehouse, bill for and ship unsafe Chinese trash, well, at every step it was just a computer. Google, X and others will happily show state funded scam advertisements from fake accounts and there is no one accountable, because it's just the computer handling those.
Now with AI, everyone can claim this magical legal immunity for themselves.
I don't think it's limited to the tech field: it's stronger here, due to the proximity with the tech giants who are enabling Trump's bullshit, but he and all that goes on around him are the real center of it.
More broadly, it's been on the rise for a number of years now, due to the Republican Party doing its level best to eliminate accountability for anything their people do wrong—like, for instance, cozying up to Epstein and his ilk.
They've been promoting a culture of unaccountability, trying to destroy the very idea that we have obligations to each other...as opposed to the masses having obligations to do whatever our leaders tell us.
Super-convincingly phrased, but after skimming how this unfolded without knowing the author, it could just as well be the inference result of
Write a convincing apology and defence regarding this blog post <url> / bsky thread <url>
I was totally caught off guard and making an honest, altruistic effort here!I find this synopsis very hard to believe, seems he's shifting blame onto an LLM instead of taking responsibility for his actions. He said he'd significantly alter the feature set, so why didn't that happen? That's a single prompt to Claude. He more than likely just told the LLM to clone the repo and ship it as is, not actually working on it in any capacity. In that case it wasn't the AI "reproducing" a bug as there was no reproduction in the first place.
I mostly ignore Gruber's slop, but I have seen cases where he got technical details of Android multitasking wrong, which is nuts because it is both well documented and open source.
How? How do I prompt to get a literal copy of another app? When Claude/Gemini builds anything for me I have a thousand ideas for functionality improvements and UI/UX changes. How do you just stop at v1 of what Claude gives you?
(I paid for Current to try it when it came out.)
I understand that using agentic led to specific glitchy things like the recreation of an exact same bug arising from the exact same code which may -- very likely, actually, in cases where one of a narrow set of best practices (or dogma) are (blindly) followed -- or may not happen if you're building similar apps. A lot of people have a lot of the same ideas and the few from that set who actually pursue their goal will likely end up with similar products built with and operate using fairly similar patterns. What then?
What if it's an improvement on the original? Like a vast improvement?
Does a Pepsi or Burger King tell Coca Cola or McDonalds "You got it dawg ...", disrobe, hand over all their assets and find some place to die alone?
'comon now, let's not throw out the baby with the bath water.
That's a bit of an scorched earth extreme response imho.
The AI eating his homework wasn't even the worst of it, and this whole debacle is just a series of poor decisions and deceptions. Bizarre. Yet there are comments in here praising his "attitude". Can I interest you fine folks in the Brooklyn Bridge? I'm selling it for 40% off, today only. Message me.
This is easily the most casually bizarre HN saga that I've experienced...
He fucked up and is owning up to it. Sure we all wish it never happened in the first place, but since he did, we prefer he confess rather than double down and go on offense or something else. The AI didn't "eat his homework". He's not a student, this wasn't a homework assignment.
No? He doubled down hard and proceeded to insult all the readers' intelligence. Just in case it's not clear: no one believes that Claude accidentally created that bug-to-bug ripoff app.
Read the link and the previous one: https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
> That’s on me, and I am responsible for what I published.
> Going forward, I won’t be using AI in this way to create any more web stuff, and I do not use it to anything close to this extent on iOS software.
I'm going off of that on the linked article.
“It became clear to me that the web app I had launched using Claude was strikingly similar to his open source project, even reproducing a bug he had later fixed.”
At what point do we confront the reality that premier AI models are blatant copyright violation machines through and through?
Nah.
This is marketing spam.
Get this shit outta here.
... but I'm not going to insert a link to his project - https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours
Until 1st August 2027 when the domain will expire (I doubt Terry will keep paying for the domain) leaving those users who memorised the .io version stranded.
You'll note they only redirected it, they didn't offer to transfer the domain.
I’m worried this is another lie. “Current,” Terry’s other app, is very obviously built by AI. Its interface carries all the tells (and slop-induced UI bugs) that you’d run into if an app was primarily built through vibe coding. I won’t get into the merits of whether the app works or is useful. I bought it and immediately requested a refund after I noticed all the AI tells.
Same. I tried on macOS and it was so buggy it was unusable. Basic shortcuts advertised on the website and app didn’t work at all. I also didn’t like the look and the limited options for streams, but I never even tried them in full because the bugs were frustrating, I was questioning if the app had had any testing at all.
> While I had genuinely never seen DarkHours.app before yesterday
If only there were a way to share your own commits resulting from your own Claude sessions to verify whether it's true...
There is some copyright discussion on one of the other submissions on this topic.
(from All You Zombies, by Robert A. Heineken, 2026, ebook)
I don't think that's a bad thing, or that it's necessarily plagiarism - unless the LLM spews out the other project's code from its training...
I'm happy to see multiple takes on the same idea. There are lots of tiny aesthetic and functional decisions that make apps different from one another. Now that implementation is cheaper we should celebrate that.
Open source isn't just code, it's an idea, a public square, and a community.
Fork a repo and customize to your heart's content? Go for it!
Fork a repo, change nothing substantial, and publish it with a nearly identical name in the app store and on a nearly identical domain? At the very least, that's in poor taste.
> I fully support open-source, but I support way more the creativity and idea from individuals that can generate something new.
None of that happened here...